IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jculte/v2y2009i1-2p49-65.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Agencement Of Industrial Branch Life Assurance

Author

Listed:
  • Liz Mcfall

Abstract

Agencements are arrangements endowed with the capacity of acting in different ways depending upon how they are configured. In advocating the term ‘agencement’ Callon's aim is to signal the close interweaving of words and actions and thus jettison the more Austinian associations of performativity. Agencement calls attention to the various processes by which economic actors, both human and non-human, are endowed with the fixtures, fittings and devices necessary to conduct themselves in particular ways. Thus depending upon how things are arranged or configured, disinterested or selfish, calculative or non-calculative, individual or collective agencies become possible. This model works well to describe the emergence of markets for industrial branch life assurance in the UK from the nineteenth century. Companies like the Prudential and the Pearl reacted to the conflicts, crises and controversies in the commercial market and the competition between socialized and privatized or prudentialist insurance models with Industrial Branch Assurance. This claimed to provide security for the thrifty poor by employing an army of agents whose weekly premium collections helped impose the discipline of thrift and security. Through the notion of agencement, the effect of hybrid combinations of human bodies, material equipment, technical devices and cognitive processes in creating a sustainable market for a peculiarly expensive financial savings product targeted at working class thrift is exposed.

Suggested Citation

  • Liz Mcfall, 2009. "The Agencement Of Industrial Branch Life Assurance," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 2(1-2), pages 49-65, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:jculte:v:2:y:2009:i:1-2:p:49-65
    DOI: 10.1080/17530350903063933
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17530350903063933
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/17530350903063933?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Donald Mackenzie & Fabian Muniesa & Lucia Siu, 2007. "Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics," Post-Print halshs-00149145, HAL.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ossandón, José, 2015. "Insurance and the sociologies of markets," economic sociology. perspectives and conversations, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, vol. 17(1), pages 6-15.
    2. Jeacle, Ingrid, 2022. "The gendered nature of valuation: Valuing life in the Titanic compensation claims process," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 99(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Leigh Johnson, 2013. "Index Insurance and the Articulation of Risk-Bearing Subjects," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 45(11), pages 2663-2681, November.
    2. Aleksandra Kuzior & Aleksy Kwilinski & Ihor Hroznyi, 2021. "The Factorial-Reflexive Approach to Diagnosing the Executors’ and Contractors’ Attitude to Achieving the Objectives by Energy Supplying Companies," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(9), pages 1-16, April.
    3. Mélodie Cartel & Franck Aggeri, 2013. "Exploring low carbon futures," Post-Print hal-01117309, HAL.
    4. Pierpaolo Andriani & Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, 2015. "Transactional innovation as performative action: transforming comparative advantage in the global coffee business," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 25(2), pages 371-400, April.
    5. Hervé Dumez, 2010. "Le Libellio d'Aegis," Post-Print hal-00546720, HAL.
    6. Franck Cochoy & Martin Giraudeau & Liz McFall, 2010. "Performativity, Economics And Politics," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 3(2), pages 139-146, July.
    7. Benjamin Braun, 2016. "From performativity to political economy: index investing, ETFs and asset manager capitalism," New Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 21(3), pages 257-273, May.
    8. Franck Aggeri, 2017. "How can performativity contribute to management and organization research? Theoretical perspectives and analytical framework [Qu'est-ce que la performativité peut apporter aux recherches en managem," Post-Print hal-01609172, HAL.
    9. Oliver Laasch & Dirk C. Moosmayer & Frithjof Arp, 2020. "Responsible Practices in the Wild: An Actor-Network Perspective on Mobile Apps in Learning as Translation(s)," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 161(2), pages 253-277, January.
    10. Hans Kjellberg, 2021. "Market expertise at work: introducing Alvin E. Roth and Michel Callon," AMS Review, Springer;Academy of Marketing Science, vol. 11(3), pages 216-218, December.
    11. Caroline Dufy, 2015. "Redefining Business Values in Russia: The Boundaries of Globalisation and Patriotism in Contemporary Russian Industry," Europe-Asia Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 67(1), pages 84-101, January.
    12. Christian Grimm & Jakob Kapeller & Stephan Puehringer, 2017. "Zum Profil der deutschsprachigen Volkswirtschaftslehre: Paradigmatische Ausrichtung und politische Orientierung deutschsprachiger Oekonom_innen (On the current state of German-speaking Economics: Para," ICAE Working Papers 70, Johannes Kepler University, Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy.
    13. Nenonen, Suvi & Storbacka, Kaj, 2013. "Finding market focus for solution business development," jbm - Journal of Business Market Management, Free University Berlin, Marketing Department, vol. 6(3), pages 123-142.
    14. Urban, Janina & Rommel, Florian, 2020. "German economics: Its current form and content," Working Paper Serie des Instituts für Ökonomie 56, Hochschule für Gesellschaftsgestaltung (HfGG), Institut für Ökonomie.
    15. Vaughan Higgins & Jacqui Dibden, 2011. "Biosecurity, Trade Liberalisation, and the (anti)Politics of Risk Analysis: The Australia-New Zealand Apples Dispute," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 43(2), pages 393-409, February.
    16. Faulconbridge, James R. & Muzio, Daniel, 2021. "Valuation devices and the dynamic legitimacy-performativity nexus: The case of PEP in the English legal profession," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 91(C).
    17. Aaron Z. Pitluck, 2016. "Performing anonymity: Investors, brokers, and the malleability of material identity information in financial markets," Working Papers 1, Becker Friedman Institute for Research In Economics.
    18. Kristof Van Assche & Martijn Duineveld & Raoul Beunen, 2014. "Power and Contingency in Planning," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 46(10), pages 2385-2400, October.
    19. Mélodie Cartel & Eva Boxenbaum & Franck Aggeri & Jean-Yves Caneill, 2017. "Policy making as collective bricolage: the role of the electricity sector in the making of the European carbon market," Post-Print hal-01615460, HAL.
    20. Lawrence King & Osvaldo Gómez Martínez, 2010. "Property Rights Reform and Development: A Critique of the Cross-National Regression Literature," Working Papers wp216, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jculte:v:2:y:2009:i:1-2:p:49-65. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RJCE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.